BlocksInform
The fusion made the entire transition from the blockchain ethereum to a proof-of-stake (pos) consensus mechanism, which abandoned the working proof of the energy-intensive crypto-extraction process in favor of today's sequencing system..
Sage D. Young is a tech protocol reporter at CoinDesk. Sage D. Young is reporting to CoinDesk about technical protocols.
Almost four months after Ethereum’s successful shift to a proof-of-stake network, the second-biggest blockchain by market cap has passed another major milestone. Over 16 million ethers (eth) were deposited in the Ethereum Beacon Chain Staking Agreement.
The figure of 16 million represents over 13.28% of the total supply of ether and close to 22.38 billion dollars at current prices. It comes nearly two years after Ethereum’s staking contract went live in 2020, when the network’s proof-of-stake Beacon Chain was first introduced.
Validators – people that help run the Ethereum network – “stake” ETH for a chance to write and authenticate transactions to the blockchain’s ledger. The staked funds get locked up with the network and accrue interest, but they will be impossible to withdraw until the network’s Shanghai upgrade, which is not expected until around March 2023.
They will be unavailable until the Shanghai network upgrade, which is not scheduled until March 2023.
Ether balance in Ethereum's Beacon Chain staking contact (Etherscan)
Data from Nansen indicates that the number of unique staking depositors stands at roughly 92,500, and data sourced from BeaconScan shows that the number of active validators is about 498,000.
A larger amount of staked ETH should theoretically make it more difficult for an individual actor to sabotage the Ethereum chain. However, the bulk of Ethereum’s stake currently belongs to a handful of large actors – fueling concern that control over the chain is becoming too centralized.
In theory, more staked EPF should make it harder for an individual actor to sabotage the Ethereum channel.
However, most of Ethereum's involvement is currently held by a handful of major players, who are concerned that control of the channel is increasingly centralized. The best depositors in the Ethereum beacon chain staking contract (nansen), out of the 16 million staked milestones, approximately 4.65 million were staked by lido – a sort of community-led collective of validators.
The number of staked ETH has climbed about 16.68% since the Merge in September 2022, when Ethereum abandoned its old proof-of-work consensus mechanism. The Merge fully transitioned the Ethereum blockchain to a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism, which abandoned proof-of-work’s energy-intensive crypto mining process in favor of today’s staking system.
